"How Psychedelic Therapy is Used to Continue the US War Machine" - PSA's Sunday Sound-Off: October 18, 2026

The Sunday Rundown

1. The Psychedelic War Machine: How Psychedelic Therapy is Used to Continue the US War Machine
2. Is the Liberation of Spirituality from Religion is the great liberation of our time?
3. PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week: October 18, 2026

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The Psychedelic War Machine: How Psychedelic Therapy is Used to Continue the US War Machine 

By Ethos De Leon

As originally published via Compost the Empire over on Substack

Source: Compost The Empire on Substack

I enlisted when I was 18 years old because, to be quite frank, I never thought I was going to live that long and had no idea what to do with my life. I signed a 6 year contract and served as 74D CBRN Specialist. I went through the brainwashing to reduce your individualized sense of self during DADT, as an out queer person. My unit was deploying to Kuwait as my contract was ending and I said hell no, get me the fuck out of this and didn’t re-up due to a platoon SGT harassing and discriminating against me for the last 3 years of my time in the military.

While I never went overseas during my time, I realized that the US wasn’t what was sold me to me my entire life in public schools, through propaganda (before social media), and that protesting and being on the streets was the best thing I could do. I became incredibly anti-imperial, then anti-colonial, and anti-oppressive overall. Psychedelics awoken and radicalized me even further because of my decolonial and anti-oppressive praxis, so much to recognize that what was going on inside the psychedelic “movement” wasn’t what they were selling it to be.

I spent my time in mainstream psychedelia from 2017-2019, particularly as the “events operation manager” and board member of Catharsis on the Mall, where the big names of psychedelia came to party and take drugs on the National Mall with approved permits. I spoke next to Rick Doblin, David Bronner, Paul Stamets and others who I didn’t know how the movement saw them, but I was put on panels with them. Gifted free tickets to the Oregon Eclipse, Burning Man, other BM regionals, Love Burn and other things. But it wasn’t until I started experiencing prejudice, dirty politics and targeting within those groups that I realized that psychedelia wasn’t all it said it was. My psychedelic rainbow glasses fell off and I saw how much psychedelia was recapitulating empire was taking place underneath the surface.

I work through daily shame and guilt for enlisting and even being a part of colonial psychedelia to see up close and personal wtf is wrong with both of these systems and institutions. I wish that I wasn’t so naive and knew better but that is why I spend the time I do exposing and researching what is really going on, so others don’t have to experience the harm and traumatization that I did.

So I share this to share that I write this from personal experience, from doing the lobby and policy work myself and seeing behind the curtains of who Oz really is. That the public is actively being deceived by these people and these organizations and I hope that one day, the masses will say no, we do not accept these potential healing tools and spiritual guides to be used, exploited, patented and sold to us.

I have a strong belief that all psychedelics, drugs, and healing modalities should be criminalized, access should be free and that it should all be nature and community based. This is the center from which I write from.

Mainstream/colonial psychedelia took a turn in the last few years that didn’t shock me: from becoming a hippie psychedelic scent into the Psychedelic War Machine. Using these words are intentional because now MAPS and its advocates are receiving money from the so-called “Department of War” and the VA to fund more failed research after MAPS lost its bid to legalize MDMA therapy and treatment through the FDA.

Instead of stepping back and analyzing the problem with their approach to “healing trauma” and achieving “net-zero trauma by 2070” (according to Doblin 🙄), they continue to plunder down the same road, but this time not just working with the zionist occupation, but now the Nazi-coup’d Amerikkkan government and billionaire class to stampede their way through FDA approval.

The entire time MAPS has been appealing to the right and alt-right, conservative veterans, soldiers and cops, in order to get approval, all the while covering their white supremacist and white culture dominance within the psychedelic space. BIPOC and queer folk have been consistently experiencing harm, exile, doxxing and cancellation by the mainstream psychedelic movement that is dominated by zionists, alt right bros and white privileged folks who tokenize and fetishize Black, Indigenous, queer and POC bodies and cultures to show that they are “diverse” and “intersectional”, when there is a long history and closets full of skeletons that say otherwise.

The appeal to “healing” veterans and “PTSD” is also a remarkable mission of MAPS that would inevitably lead to the hippie psychedelic movement to becoming a corporate war machine. Veterans have often been a target for grifting good doers to get redirect funding from the underfunded system of the VA to their projects. The attempts to heal veterans has always been a bandaid to the entire problem, which is sending human beings of a certain nation to commit genocidal acts and atrocious war crimes, causing PTSD for the shame of being a cog in the genocidal war machine of the U.S. military.

The equation for how combat military personnel get PTSD is pretty simple:

Join the military + Get brainwashed, bullied and reduce your individual identity to a military one + Get Sent to fight in a “war” + Commit Genocidal Crimes/Atrocities = PTSD

How PTSD happens in the military is complex also. Many personnel, like myself, walk away with PTSD due to harassment, bullying, sexual assault and violence, and other abuses with ranks, it is important for me to note this is not the type of PTSD that I am talking about.

While there are many nuances of why people join, especially Black and brown poor folks who have recruiters and programs such as JROTC and ROTC in their schools, we in the US empire are led to believe that the US military does “good” and, for some reason, its an honorable thing to be the “police of the world”.

The Privileged Approach to Trauma Healing

First and foremost, Doblin and MAPS’ approach to healing and trauma is one of extreme privilege, believing and selling that trauma can be healed by sitting in the clinical setting and by taking psychedelics.

We explored the neuroscience of psychedelics and entheogenic substances in my last post, so we know that there is potential that psychedelics opens a window through softening our neural pathways to rewire new pathways. My argument in that article is that:

…neuroplasticity, specifically through the use of psychedelics, is value-neutral, that the outcome is dependent on one’s set and setting, and that solely the use of psychedelics alone does not constitute superior morality or ethics. That same opened window that allows healing also allows programming, and what gets installed depends on who and what is in the room, including the dominant culture.

So if neuroplasticity and psychedelic us to facilitate is is a value-neutral, this means that if we are not doing the work to unwind what made us sick or ill in the first place, or give veterans PTSD in the first place, then MDMA or psychedelic therapy is inevitably just a bandaid to cover up the “guilt and shame” of committing war crimes and genocide on behalf of the US empire and the pedophile, predatory billionaire class to grab more resources and destroy the earth.

But the root of the solution isn’t simply giving psychedelics to people and doing talk therapy or whatever goes on in those sanitized rooms and settings (I have never been able to afford them so I don’t have experience). The root of the solution is ending all war so there isn’t PTSD in the first place.

That is why if we are not engaging in the values and principles that led us to enlisting and joining the US empire’s genocidal army in the first place, then is real healing going on?

This is why I stand on the perspective that MAPS and Doblin’s approach to healing is one that is still furthering war-mongering, violence of capitalistic pursuits of the billionaire class. That the idea of “MDMA therapy” without examining the decisions, the culture and the cosmologies that led us to engaging in that kind of violence in the first place, is without merit and without the actual value of healing.

The NIH defines healing as, “the process of restoring health, wholeness, or normal function to damaged physical tissues, mental states, or emotional well-being.”

Which if we are being honest of what caused the PTSD, the trauma, the illness, the sickness in the first place. And what is causing this damage on our brains and pre-frontal context is the cosmological seed of separation, that has led to the neurocolonizing paradigm that effects our neural pathways to make decisions that keep the colonizing, genocidal empire in place.

Modernity is not a healing or regenerative hallucination. The cultures that are fractalized from it, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheternormativity, evangelism and dogmatism, misogyny and sexism, etc, are death cults. The separation from nature and the divine order of the infinite and the mother earth (some call God, the Mystic Law, Allah, Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka), will always lead to death, destruction, and violence.

And when our healing modalities do not reflect repairing and healing that connection, then it is not healing at all. It is a repackaging of the paradigms of sick-care, sold to us through capitalism, and will continue to make us sick.

The Clinical Setting

“Set and setting” has become the go-to phrase of mainstream psychedelia, the thing every podcast bro and every clinical researcher will tell you matters most. And they’re not wrong. The mindset you bring into the medicine and the environment you are held in shape what the medicine does to you and through you. Indigenous peoples didn’t need Timothy Leary to name this for them. Ceremony has always been the setting.

So let’s look at the setting MAPS and Lykos decided healing should look like.

You lie on a couch in a clinic or an office. Eye shades on, headphones in, a curated playlist chosen by someone else. Two therapists sit beside you for eight or so hours while the MDMA moves through you. You do this three times, wrapped in preparation and integration sessions of talk therapy. Then you go home. To the same job, the same family systems, the same country that sent you to war or made you sick in the first place.

That is the setting. A sealed room. No land, no community, no elders, no ancestors, no songs that have been sung for generations. Just you, your trauma and two credentialed strangers in a room that most of us will never be able to afford.

And this is where the value-neutral window matters. If psychedelics soften our neural pathways so new ones can be laid down, then the question is not whether the room is “safe.” The question is who is in the room and what culture they carry in with them. Because whatever is in the room is what gets installed.

Who are the therapists? Who trained them, and in what cosmology? Who wrote the protocol, who funded it and who profits when it gets approved? When the people holding the space are steeped in the same white-dominant, individualist, sick-care paradigm that produced the wound, what do you think gets programmed into that open window?

We already have an answer. In MAPS’ own Phase 2 MDMA trial in Canada, video footage surfaced of two therapists pinning down and cuddling a participant, Meaghan Buisson, while she was under the influence of MDMA. She later reported that one of those therapists had sexual contact with her after the sessions. MAPS acknowledged the ethical violation, and then kept marching toward FDA approval. When the FDA’s advisory committee finally reviewed the data in 2024, it voted overwhelmingly against approval, with concerns ranging from functional unblinding to therapists shaping what participants reported about their own experiences.

This is what happens when you take a sacred technology out of ceremony and put it into a clinic. The power doesn’t disappear. It just gets handed to whoever has the license.

And then there’s COMPASS Pathways, the Thiel-backed psilocybin company, which tried to patent aspects of the therapeutic setting itself. Rooms with soft furniture. Muted colors. A “non-clinical appearance.” Read that again. They tried to own the vibe of the room. If that doesn’t tell you where this is all going, I don’t know what will.

The clinical setting is the empire’s cosmology rendered in drywall. It recreates the very separation that made us sick: separation from the land, separation from community, separation from the divine and separation from accountability to anyone outside of a licensing board and an insurance billing code. It treats healing as something done to an individual by a professional, rather than something that happens with and through your people, your land and your relationships.

In ceremony, the medicine is held by those who carry lineage and responsibility, people who answer to their community, their elders and the spirits of the medicine itself. The healing doesn’t end when the session does, because you never leave the web of relationship that held you. You are accountable, and so are they.

In the clinic, you are a patient. A data point. A billable unit. And the room is designed that way on purpose, because a setting that can be standardized can be scaled, and a setting that can be scaled can be sold.

Which brings us to who is doing the selling.

Big Pharma 2.0: MAPS non-profit > MAPS PBO > Lykos Therapeutics / Resilient Pharmaceuticals

Rick Doblin founded MAPS in 1986 as a nonprofit, one year after MDMA was criminalized. For decades it sold itself as the scrappy underdog of the psychedelic world: the donor-funded research outfit fighting the drug war from the inside, the hippies in lab coats who were going to free the medicine.

But in 2014, MAPS built itself a company. The MAPS Public Benefit Corporation was a wholly owned subsidiary whose stated purpose was to balance social benefit with income from the legal sale of MDMA, other psychedelics and marijuana. The nonprofit that told us it was here to liberate these medicines then created a corporation to sell them.

“Public benefit corporation” is a nice phrase. It’s designed to make you feel better about capitalism. But legally, it’s still a corporation. It still has investors and those investors still expect a return. The “public benefit” is a promise, not a structure of accountability to the peoples and lands these medicines come from.

By the time the Phase 3 trials wrapped up, MAPS had raised around $140 million for its MDMA program, and it still wasn’t enough. So in January 2024, MAPS PBC rebranded as Lykos Therapeutics and closed a $100 million Series A. It was led by an investment firm called Helena, with money from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, as in hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen. MAPS kept six of the eight board seats, so don’t let anyone tell you Lykos was some separate entity that MAPS had nothing to do with. Lykos’ own CEO described the moment as transitioning to a company focused on commercialization.

And the name? Lykos means wolf in Greek. They said it represents bravery, courage, loyalty and intelligence. I’ll let you sit with a pharmaceutical company naming itself after a predator.

Then it all started to unravel. In August 2024, the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. Within days, the journal Psychopharmacology retracted three papers by MAPS and Lykos researchers for what it called “unethical conduct” at their Canadian trial site. At that site, an unlicensed MAPS therapist named Richard Yensen had a sexual relationship with a trial participant, Meaghan Buisson, after her MDMA sessions ended. She later accused him of sexual assault in civil court.

There is no ethics code in any healing profession that allows a therapist to have a sexual relationship with a client. And a person who has just been given MDMA by the people holding power over her care is in no position to freely consent to anything with them. That isn’t a “protocol violation.” That is abuse of power, in the exact window where a person is most open and most vulnerable.

And the authors knew. They knew when they submitted those papers. They said nothing and kept her data in. When the journal finally pulled the papers, Doblin and other MAPS-affiliated authors disagreed with the retraction, and Lykos said it would file a complaint with the Committee on Publication Ethics. Not a word about repair. Not a word about her.

Lykos then laid off 75% of its workforce, and Doblin stepped down from its board.

You’d think that would be the moment to stop, step back and ask what went wrong. Instead, they went looking for bigger money.

In May 2025, Antonio Gracias co-led a $50 million Series B with British hedge fund billionaire Christopher Hohn to take control of Lykos. Gracias is Elon Musk’s longtime friend and one of Tesla’s earliest investors, and at the time he was working inside DOGE. According to Doblin himself, it all started with a conversation at Burning Man. Of course it did. I’ve been gifted those tickets. I know what that playa is for the people who can afford the camps. Watchdog groups have raised flags about a DOGE operative buying a drug company while DOGE had staff embedded in the very agency that would decide whether to approve its drug.

Three months later, Lykos changed its name again, this time to Resilient Pharmaceuticals. That’s three names in under two years. And as of this summer, Resilient has reportedly resubmitted its application to the FDA without running a new Phase 3 trial.

So let’s trace the arc: a nonprofit becomes a public benefit corporation, which becomes a venture-backed pharma company, which ends up in the hands of a Musk-adjacent billionaire who was working inside the government at the time. That isn’t a psychedelic renaissance. That’s Big Pharma 2.0 in tie-dye.

Follow the Money

If we want to understand what a movement truly is, we cannot rely on what it says about itself; we have to follow the money. MAPS has long presented itself as a grassroots effort powered by small donors and true believers who wanted to liberate these medicines, and while those small donors were real, the money that actually carried MDMA to the FDA’s doorstep came from a very different place.

In 2017, at the Psychedelic Science conference in Oakland, Dr. Bronner’s pledged $5 million to MAPS for the Phase 3 trials, to be paid at a million dollars a year over five years. The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, a network of wealthy donors whose board members also sat on the MAPS board, raised another $30 million to complete those same trials. In 2018, the Mercer Family Foundation gave MAPS $1 million, and this is the same Mercer family, Robert and Rebekah, who bankrolled Trump’s first presidential campaign, Breitbart and Steve Bannon. MAPS celebrated that gift with a press release thanking them for their commitment to America’s veterans.

Doblin was never shy about where all of this was headed. When the Bronner pledge was announced, he explained that MAPS intended to use the income from selling MDMA to train therapists and open treatment clinics around the world, and that making MDMA a legal medicine would turn MAPS into “a self-sustaining organism.” In his own words, the goal was never simply to free the medicine but to build an organization that could sustain itself by selling it.

In 2020, Antonia Gracias donated $1 million to MAPS, in 2023 he gave Harvard $16 million to fund psychedelic research, and in 2025, after the FDA rejection, he took control of the company. He reportedly put $25 million from his family foundation into recapitalizing Lykos, renamed it Resilient Pharmaceuticals and moved its operations to Chicago alongside his own investment firm. Steve Jurvetson, another SpaceX director and longtime Musk ally, had already helped fund the Lykos trials. What this trajectory reveals is how the billionaire class engages with movements like this one: they begin as donors, they become patrons of the institutions that produce the research and legitimacy, and when the movement stumbles, they are positioned to buy what remains of it.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, the surveillance company whose tools are used by ICE and the military, backed ATAI Life Sciences, which went on to become the largest shareholder in COMPASS Pathways, the company that attempted to patent aspects of the therapeutic setting itself. MAPS spent decades paving the road toward legal psychedelic medicine, and men like Thiel arrived ready to build the toll booths along it.

The government is now paying for this as well. Under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the so-called Department of War funded two MDMA trials totaling nearly $10 million, run through Walter Reed and testing MDMA on active duty, National Guard and Reserve service members. The VA is funding its own MDMA study, which is the first VA-funded psychedelic research since the 1960s.

The inclusion of active duty service members should give all of us pause. This is not an effort to heal the soldiers the military has broken so that they can come home and stop fighting; it is research into how to keep them functional enough to remain in service. The same institution that manufactures the sickness is now funding the medicine to manage it, which allows the war machine to continue without ever having to stop.

When we lay all of this side by side, the pattern is difficult to ignore. Soap money, hedge fund money, Trump money, Musk money, Thiel money and Pentagon money have all flowed into this project, and every one of these funders claims to want to heal trauma. Yet not one of them is funding an end to the conditions that produce that trauma in the first place.

So when these institutions tell us what healing looks like, we should remember who paying for this “healing” to happen.

Collaboration with Hegeseth’s Department of War

The relationship between psychedelics and the US military did not begin with MAPS. During the Cold War, the Army tested LSD and the hallucinogenic incapacitating agent BZ on its own soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, and the CIA ran MKUltra, dosing unwitting people in the name of mind control and interrogation. The military’s interest in these substances has always been about one thing: what they could do for the war machine. So when MAPS began courting the Pentagon, it was not opening a new chapter in psychedelic history. It was returning these medicines to an institution that had already weaponized them once.

Doblin has been working toward this partnership for a long time, and he has never hidden it. As far back as 2005, when some MAPS supporters were outraged at the idea of the Pentagon getting involved in MDMA research, Doblin wrote on the MAPS forum that it would be great if the military took over funding projects like this. By 2012, MAPS was floating psychedelic treatment for active-duty soldiers, and Doblin was visiting the Pentagon to persuade military medical officials to allow an MDMA trial in soldiers still in service. He told Wired that despite the long history of conflict between psychedelics and the military, there was “a way for us to come together.” This is the same man who grew up protesting the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex behind it.

The pitch only escalated from there. In 2022, Doblin said from the main stage of a Miami psychedelics conference that providing active-duty soldiers with psychedelics was “where the biggest barrier is now,” and that MAPS had been in discussions with Walter Reed about making these treatments available to soldiers still serving. When asked whether soldiers who received psychedelic treatment might not want to return to service, he said he did not believe that would be the case. Then, at SXSW in 2024, according to reporting by Truthdig, Doblin suggested that new military recruits could be dosed with MDMA upon enlistment. His argument was that treating people closer to the trauma could keep soldiers from leaving with disabilities, and that it could create soldiers who were less reactive and better able to handle whatever circumstances came their way. What began as a promise to help veterans heal and return home had become a proposal to make soldiers more efficient before they ever saw combat.

The infrastructure followed the rhetoric. In August 2024, the same month the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy, MAPS gave Emory University a $200,000 grant for a pilot study of MDMA combined with Massed Prolonged Exposure therapy. That same treatment model is now being tested by the Department of Defense on active-duty, National Guard and Reserve service members through funding Congress approved in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. In December 2025, with Pete Hegseth running what this administration now calls the Department of War, MAPS announced that it had completed a therapy training program for the clinicians in that DoD-funded trial, adapting its curriculum specifically for therapists working with active-duty service members. MAPS called it the first ever Department of Defense-affiliated MDMA-assisted therapy pilot, and it celebrated this as part of its mission to expand access to safe, evidence-based psychedelic therapy.

I want to be precise about what this means. MAPS is not simply advocating for veterans who have already left the military and are trying to rebuild their lives. It is training the clinicians who will give MDMA to soldiers who are still under contract, still under command and still deployable. A service member on active duty does not have the same freedom to consent that a civilian does, and they do not get to decide what happens to their healing once the military has decided they are fit to return to duty. Two months before MAPS announced this training program, the Department of Defense began testing service members for psilocybin. The message could not be clearer: psychedelics are acceptable only when the military controls who receives them, how they are administered and what they are used for.

This collaboration did not happen under some neutral administration. It happened under a Secretary of War who has spent his tenure purging the military of anything he considers “woke,” and under a president who signed an executive order in April 2026 to fast-track psychedelic research for veterans. That order was celebrated at the White House alongside Joe Rogan, and advocates thanked Secretary Kennedy and Administrator Oz by name. The mainstream psychedelic movement spent years telling us that these medicines would dissolve the ego, open our hearts and make us more connected to one another and the earth. Now that same movement is standing in the Oval Office and taking contracts from the Pentagon, and very few of its leaders seem troubled by the contradiction.

As someone who enlisted at eighteen and served my contract as a CBRN specialist during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I know exactly what the military does with the tools it is given. It does not ask what will make a human being whole. It asks what will make a human being useful. And if the window of neuroplasticity that psychedelics open is value-neutral, as I have argued, then the question we must ask is who will be standing in that window when it opens for a nineteen-year-old soldier. The answer, increasingly, is the Department of War, trained and supported by the same organization that once promised these medicines would help us build a more peaceful world.

The Israeli Occupation Forces Were the Test Subjects and Proof of “MDMA Therapy” for Active Duty War Criminals

If we want to understand where MAPS was taking MDMA therapy for soldiers, we have to look at where it was tested first. Long before MAPS was training clinicians for the Department of War, it was building its military model in Israel, a country with mandatory conscription, a permanent reserve system and a military that has occupied Palestinian land for generations. As far back as 2005, MAPS’ own Bulletin described its hope of developing an MDMA research program in the United States and Israel treating soldiers with PTSD. MAPS staff working in Israel wrote openly about efforts to recruit Israeli combat soldiers into its MDMA studies.

In February 2019, Israel became the first national government to approve a compassionate use program for MDMA-assisted therapy, allowing patients to receive the treatment outside of clinical trials. The Israeli Ministry of Health granted MAPS $500,000 in medical and hospital services to support it, and the Schusterman Family Foundation, a major funder of projects in Israel and the Jewish community, contributed a grant. In its own press release, MAPS named IDF soldiers among the high-risk populations the program was meant to serve. Before the FDA had approved anything, the Israeli state had already made MDMA therapy available to its soldiers, with the support of MAPS.

Then came October 7th and the genocidal war on Gaza that followed. MAPS Israel launched an initiative called Healing October 7th, raising $2 million for a multi-site study of group MDMA therapy for Nova festival survivors, residents of the Gaza border region and IOF war criminals who served in the area. The trial, sponsored by Sheba Medical Center and approved by the Israeli Ministry of Health, is designed to compare group and individual MDMA therapy across 168 patients. MAPS Israel explained that the group model was meant to let clinicians treat more patients at once, and one of the initiative’s co-founders described it as a scalable solution for a massive wave of PTSD. At the same time, HaEmek Medical Center began reporting that about 80% of Israeli soldiers in its MDMA study saw their symptoms drop significantly, and most no longer met the criteria for PTSD.

I want us to sit with what this means: these soldiers were not being treated after a war had ended. They were being treated while the bombing of Gaza continued, inside a military system where reservists are called back again and again. MAPS Israel was not designing a therapy to help people walk away from violence. It was designing a scalable system to treat soldiers in large numbers while that violence was still underway, which is exactly the kind of model a military needs if it intends to keep its soldiers functional through a long war. When Doblin stands at SXSW and talks about dosing recruits and treating soldiers closer to the trauma, Israel is the proof of concept he can point to.

And what exactly is being healed? One Israeli combat veteran described his MDMA therapy as “magic,” saying that afterward he became more forgiving of himself and no longer beat himself up over for committing genocide that targets non-combatants, particularly children and women. This is the heart of my argument, when a soldier’s shame and guilt over committing war crimes and genocide is treated as a symptom to be dissolved, rather than a signal from the soul that something is deeply wrong, the medicine does not lead them toward repair or accountability. It leads them toward a false notion of peace with what they have done, and potentially toward the capacity to do it again. That is not healing. That is moral injury being managed so the war criminal can continue committing war crimes.

MAPS has said that it is working to expand access to MDMA therapy for Palestinians as well. But, lets be really clear, you cannot offer post-traumatic stress treatment to a people who are still living under bombardment and siege, because for them the trauma is not post. It is ongoing, and it is being inflicted by the very war criminals MAPS Israel is treating. A healing modality that tends to the wounds of the occupier while the occupied are still being killed is not neutral. It is part of the machinery.

This is why I say the IOF was the testing ground. The value-neutral window of neuroplasticity was opened for soldiers in the middle of a genocide, and what was installed in that window was not a refusal to fight. It was relief, self-forgiveness and readiness to continue to commit genocide. Now the same organization is bringing that model to the US military, where it is training clinicians to give MDMA to American soldiers who are still on active duty.

Conclusion

When I first walked into mainstream psychedelia, I believed what I was told. I believed these medicines would wake people up, that the people championing them were on the side of liberation and that legalization would bring healing to the masses. It took years of watching from the inside, sitting on panels, organizing events and experiencing the harm firsthand, to see what was really being built beneath all of the rainbow rhetoric. What I saw was not a renaissance. It was a recapitulation of empire, dressed in tie-dye and sold back to us as medicine.

The story I have traced here is not complicated once you follow it from beginning to end. A nonprofit that promised to free these medicines created a corporation to sell them back to us. That corporation took money from the Mercers, hedge fund billionaires and Musk’s inner circle, and when it failed to win FDA approval, it was bought by a man who was working inside the government at the time. Along the way, a trial participant was harmed by one of its therapists, and the researchers kept her data in their papers without disclosing what had happened to her. Its founder spent decades courting the Pentagon, testing his model on Israeli soldiers in the middle of a genocide, and now his organization is training clinicians to give MDMA to American soldiers who are still on active duty. Every step of this story was taken in the name of healing trauma, and not one step was taken toward ending the conditions that cause it.

This is why I keep returning to the question of what healing actually means. If neuroplasticity is value-neutral, and the window that psychedelics open can be used to install anything, then the medicine itself cannot be the answer. What matters is who is in the room, what cosmology they carry and what they intend to plant in that open window. When the room is designed by billionaires, funded by the Pentagon and staffed by clinicians trained to return soldiers to duty, what gets installed is not liberation. It is the empire’s own logic, made more efficient and more bearable for the people it depends on. That is neurocolonization working exactly as designed.

Real healing asks something that the clinic, the corporation and the military will never ask. It asks us to look at the root of the wound and to stop producing it. For a soldier, that means confronting the decisions, the culture and the cosmology that led them to pick up a weapon on behalf of an empire in the first place. For a society, it means ending war, ending occupation and ending the systems of extraction that make so many of us sick. For a movement that claims to care about consciousness, it means refusing to hand these sacred medicines over to the very institutions that have weaponized them before and are preparing to weaponize them again.

I do not believe the answer is a better pharmaceutical company, a more ethical clinical trial or a more diverse board of directors. I believe these medicines, along with all drugs and healing modalities, should be decriminalized, that access to them should be free and that they should be held by nature and community rather than by patents and a single-payer healthcare system. They belong in relationship with the land, with elders and lineage holders and with communities that are accountable to one another across generations. They do not belong to Lykos, Resilient, COMPASS, Thiel, Gracias or the Department of War. They never did.

Neurodecolonization begins with refusal. It begins when we stop accepting the story that healing can be bought, packaged and administered to us by the same forces that wounded us. It continues when we return to the earth, to each other and to the cosmologies of relationship that empire has spent centuries trying to erase. I write this not because I have all the answers, but because I was once part of this machine, and I carry the responsibility of telling the truth about what I saw.

My hope is that one day enough of us will look at this industry and say no. No to the patents, no to the war contracts, no to the billionaire saviors and no to a version of healing that leaves the empire intact. These medicines came from the earth, and they were carried for generations by peoples who understood that healing is never an individual transaction. It is a collective return to right relationship. Anything less is not healing at all.

Editor’s Note: This op-ed was originally published by Author Ethos De Leon (They/Them) over at Compost The Empire — Subscribe over on Substack or donate to Ethos’ work directly on Venmo: @ethos-deleon333.

ICYMI: Is the Liberation of Spirituality from Religion is the great liberation of our time? Feat. Dr. Jim Garrison

From “Evaluating the Next Generation of Psychedelic Higher Education”

In this interview clip from PSA’s most recent livestream, Jim Garrison calls the liberation of spirituality from religion the great liberation of our time, equal in magnitude to women's liberation. He traces it to the 1960s, when Americans and Europeans went east, encountered Hinduism and Buddhism, and brought back what he calls the sweet perfume of pure spirituality.

Source: “Evaluating the Next Generation of Psychedelic Higher Education”

PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week

Weekly dispatches from across the psychedelic landscape.

📜 Law & Policy

From our friends at Marijuana Moment

Psychedelic Church’s Secret Agreement With DEA And Approval From Iowa Officials Allows Import And Manufacturing Of Ayahuasca

By Tom Angell

💰 Business

Meanwhile, over at STAT News…

Former FDA officials blast DOGE as ‘one of the biggest disasters in American history’

By Chelsea Cirruzzo

🎨 Culture

From our friends at DoubleBlind

Indigenous Peoples’ Day Ain’t Over, and Urban Indigenous Collective Is Throwing a Party About It

By Mary Carreon

💊 Science & Research

How to Change Your Behavior

By Gianna Biscontini